Humanoid Robots Are a Distraction (Here's What Actually Works) ft. Grigorij Dudnik
Tue Feb 03 2026
What happens when AI leaves the screen and enters the physical world? It breaks.
Spencer and Jacob sit down with robotics researcher Grigorij Dudnik, who's been running real experiments with real robots—and finding that most of our assumptions about AI fall apart the moment hardware gets involved. The big one: the idea that a single massive model can do everything. Grigorij makes the case that the future isn't a "super-intelligent" humanoid. It's a modular system where an LLM plans, specialized models act, and physical constraints keep everything honest.
They get into why humanoids are overrated, why generalization keeps failing in robotics, and why a system built on narrow, composable skills might be the actual breakthrough everyone's overlooking.
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What happens when AI leaves the screen and enters the physical world? It breaks. Spencer and Jacob sit down with robotics researcher Grigorij Dudnik, who's been running real experiments with real robots—and finding that most of our assumptions about AI fall apart the moment hardware gets involved. The big one: the idea that a single massive model can do everything. Grigorij makes the case that the future isn't a "super-intelligent" humanoid. It's a modular system where an LLM plans, specialized models act, and physical constraints keep everything honest. They get into why humanoids are overrated, why generalization keeps failing in robotics, and why a system built on narrow, composable skills might be the actual breakthrough everyone's overlooking.